Introduction

Sony Electronics is one of the biggest names in all forms of technology having to do with home theater, personal audio and video, as well as personal computing. It has a reputation for producing outstanding products that keep up with current standards and technologies as well as designing their own standards and technologies to compete with the rest of the big industry names in all fields.

One type of product Sony has made a permanent mark in is optical media. It has produced everything from simple CD readers to the latest dual layer DVD writers. Besides keeping up with up and coming technologies Sony consistently works to improve products which are already on the market.

Dual mode burners have been out for a while and have been improving both in quality and speed. Recently we received a sample of Sony's new 12x DVD+/-RW burner, the DRU-540A. Though not the first 12x drive released to the world we believed it would be a great competitor due to Sony's reputation. The first 12x capable DVD+/-RW was Plextor's PX-712A capable of writing DVD+R discs at 12x speeds. The second 12x burner we looked at was MSI's DR12A.

So how will this new 12x burner perform compared to the other two? We know you can't wait so we have run a few benchmarks with various types of media to compare reading and writing performance across all. Take a look at what we found...

TrogdorJW: This issue is common among low quality media like the Philips C08 and the VDSPMSAB 001 DVD+R's we tested with the DRU-540A. While forcing write speeds to a lower setting may reduce coaster production for some media, there are those other low quality media that may choke on certain drives no matter what write speeds you force on them.Reply

So do the read/burn problems with cheap media persist if you force the record speed to 4X or even 2X? Obviously, buying a 12X burner and using it as a 4X is sort of dumb, but if you're too cheap to find good quality media - or maybe only too cheap some of the time - then it would be nice to know you can force the drive to fall back to a more compatible setting.

Example: I have problems with my Lite On 52X CD-RW drive when writing Memorex discs at 52X speeds, but when I write them at 32X they work perfectly fine. Is that common, or do I have a faulty drive?Reply